John O'Nolan

Some major bugs with MacOS 27 <> Arc Browser 😑 windows seems to just constantly resize at random Wonder if this will even get fixed or if it will finally be the thing that forces me to switch to something else

Just found my first sketches from 2017(!) imagining what Ghost might look like with memberships built in This was several years before anything like it existed in the publishing world We were only a team of ~7 people at the time, so it took us a while to get there, but the idea was the right one

In Amsterdam for PublicSpaces conf ✌️ say hi if you’re around

Messing with a floating Ghost admin toolbar that sits at the bottom of your screen if you're signed in as a staff user, for quick access to edit any post/page

experimenting with a media library for @ghost.org (WIP)

On this day, 13y ago, @ghost.org started as an idea on kickstarter 5,000+ people backed the project to help bring it to life and support the future of media and journalism Today, Ghost has generated over $150M for independent publishers all over the world www.kickstarter.com/projects/joh...

Lots of publishing platforms claim to be independent and open. Ghost actually is. 🪷

In SF for Stripe Sessions again this year - say hi if you’re around!

Experimenting with some AI-assisted features in @Ghost for helping with generated structured data and site administration Kinda fun. Not sure what the UI should be. Don't really want to have to click a button, would be even better if it just happened in the background

🚀 NEW: Podcasting is one of the most popular ways publishers share their work — and now you can run members-only podcasts on Ghost, with our brand new @transistor.fm integration Quality writing 🤝 Quality audio ghost.org/changelog/tr...

Only realised after posting: Time from $9M→$10M ARR was 14 weeks Which is especially wild when you consider the first $1M ARR took 5 years 😅

We've all heard "SaaS is dead" enough times. Recently I read multiple people developing something more specific: Nicolas Bustamante from the software side, Ben Thompson from the hardware side, @johnonolan.bsky.social about open source. Different starting points. Same direction.

This week Cloudflare shamelessly cloned and released the product of one of their primary competitors. I'm beginning to wonder - if AI can rewrite software from scratch, without using any of the original code, do software licenses actually mean anything anymore? john.onolan.org/open-source-...

Goin' live with the Laravel team here in a couple mins 🔊 $PHP

I've seen some of what Aaron's working on here, and it's so far ahead of anything I've managed to figure out for myself. (I told him to price this 10x higher but he refused listen to me, so it's your lucky day.)

one thing I didn't expect while building alcove.news is the unbridled joy of removing newsletters from my email inbox feels *so* much better having communication/reading in two different places (you can follow @alcove.blog.alcove.news.ap.brid.gy if you want updates on progress)

Back on GPT 5.2 Max fulltime now, Claude 4.5 has been nerfed so hard it's actually unusable this week

I've decided to pursue a very bad idea and see where it goes. I'm making an RSS reader. john.onolan.org/making-an-rs...

Our first billboard! Live from Stripe City bfcm.stripe.com

If you're curious about the build of Ghost Explore — and some of the details of my ... *checks notes* ... 1,256 commits on this project over the past few months The @laravelphp.bsky.social team just published a nice lil piece about Ghost + Laravel Cloud: laravel.com/blog/14m-req...

Stoked to share some of the details behind a project I've been working on for a long time, in partnership with @ahrefs.bsky.social — and built on top of @laravelphp.bsky.social Spent YEARS wanting this to exist, so I finally just built it.

Okay, this is fun, and brings me back to some neumorphism nostalgia: a fun color palette generator, that lets you play with different color spaces, and build different palettes type colorpalette.pro/?color=lab%2...

Today @ghost.org passed $9M ARR — the first time we've ever crossed a $1M milestone 2x in a calendar year 🎉 Publisher revenue is growing even faster! Now more than $120M GMV earned by writers and journalists using the product to fund their work

This week @johnonolan.bsky.social joined us for a Sweet Hang and he's got big news for @ianlandsman.com & @aaronfrancis.com: This week he Laravel New'd....twice! 🚀

development DB dropped again me: what did you do ai: nothing guv, swear down, I ain't touched it, if anything happened to the DB it wasn't cause of me

Doing ~12M req/mo now on my laravel app - which powers explore.ghost.org (the public front end is very simple, the back end is much more extensive) Still blows my mind how much you can build/manage singlehandedly with a bit of help from Claude and Laravel Cloud

I'm always impressed by just how many people who've never maintained any open source software are so wonderfully generous with their advice about how to do it correctly

Had an amazing time this week speaking at PenpotFest in Madrid - there’s a lot of inspiring work happening in open source design tools these days that gives me a lot of optimism for the future Thanks for having me @penpot.app 🫶

@rmccue.io You were workin' as a waitress in a cocktail bar

it’s amazing (not in a good way) how many books these days are just lengthy accounts of every guest the author has had on their podcast and what each of them said

Aggregate publisher revenue on @ghost.org is currently growing at ~$1M ARR per *week* The business of independent publishing and journalism is looking in better shape than it has in a very long time

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox www.lesswrong.com/posts/vidXh2...

Ah I see! It’s not a 12MP crop of a 48MP sensor, it’s a pro fusion telephoto liquid XDR Dynamic Island camera system ultra

One of the easiest ways to spot an AI generated reply, other than em dashes, is the endless use of the phrase: "This isn't [trivial, insignificant thing], it's [important, considered thing]." Stands out like a sore thumb.

I took a couple weeks off, can someone catch me up on the 4years of AI news that happened while I was away? So far I've gathered that we all hate Claude now

Another story hidden between the lines of this one: Publishers on Ghost are earning (multiples) more revenue compared to some other platforms that are endlessly shilling their "game changer growth hacking features" Quality content > Growth hacking

When writing was first invented, it was critiqued as likely to create the “illusion of wisdom” - because people would no longer bother to memorize knowledge. What happens when we invent tools? We adapt, and we evolve.

Single most annoying thing to me about Claude Code is that it consistently does "what it believes you meant, based on what you said" rather than "what you said" Apparently this is a deliberate/intentional feature - but really wish there was a way to disable

my kingdom for a flight booking MCP so I never have to touch an airline website again